by CCW | 24 March 2026 20:00
Mary’s response to the divine will announced to her by the Angel Gabriel is the epitome of the Christian Faith, a firm but emphatic “yes” to God through whom God becomes human. It is impossible to think of Mary apart from Christ or Christ apart from Mary. She is “the pure source of his pure humanity” (Irenaeus) as ordained from before the foundation of the world; in other words, divinely ordered. She is, in the words of the Chalcedonian Definition of the Council of Ephesus (451), Theotokos, “the Mother of God.” What that means goes to the heart of the understanding of Christ’s Incarnation.
The Annunciation is the moment in time of Christ’s conception. He is made man through “the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, Theotokos, according to his manhood”, his “human nature (κατα την ανθροποτητα),” just as Christ is the eternal Son “begotten of his Father according to his Godhead” (κατα την θεοτητα) (Chalcedonian Definition). She is not the mother of the Godhead, the source of divinity, the maker of God, as it were, for that would negate humanity itself. Mary as Theotokos, literally God-bearer, belongs to the gathering into unity of all of the images about Jesus Christ’s divinity and humanity understood in their mutual integrity and revealed to us in Christ. Mary is the chosen vessel of his becoming human and incarnate, that is to say, in the flesh, while remaining absolutely and eternally God. The maker of God to us, it could be said, in ways that belong only to poetic licence.
The emphasis on Mary as Virgin and Mother is the witness of Scripture and Creed to the essential doctrine of the Incarnation and the Trinity; the two are inseparable. Mary plays an essential role in the economy of salvation and in the life of prayer. Her “yes” to God is the inverse and the overcoming of the sin of Adam and Eve. Ave is, as the Fathers note, the reverse of Eve. But she is not passive or unengaged in the work of human redemption. She “conceived by the Holy Ghost”, as the Apostles’ Creed states, yet, in Luke’s account, the Angel clearly says “thou shalt conceive in thy womb and bring forth a Son,” echoing the lesson from Isaiah. She conceived but without the aid of a man. She did not simply receive like a passive vessel, a mere conduit. She is an active agent in the work of human redemption that looks back to creation itself as spoken into existence by God. What comes from God to her is actively embraced and engaged by her. In her “yes” is the proto-evangelium of Genesis fulfilled, a prophecy of the hope and longing for redemption that “her seed shall bruise thy [the serpent’s] head” even as he “shall bruise his heel,”a reference to Christ and his Passion. Nor is this some sort of gnostic deception, a matter of her and our being deceived. Her Annunciation is non recipiet et non decipiet sed concipiet, as Andrewes summarizes.
The Annunciation celebrated on March 25th anticipates the birth of Christ celebrated on December 25th. The Feast of the Annunciation most often falls in Lent, sometimes in Passiontide, occasionally in Holy Week, even Good Friday, and, more rarely, on Easter Day. In the case of Holy Week and Easter Day, the Feast is transferred to the Tuesday after Easter Week. Such sensibilities highlight two things: there is no Passion without a body, and the humility of Mary who exists and yields herself entirely to the divine purpose and initiative revealed most fully on the Cross. Luther, in his commentary on the Magnificat, says that “Mary does not want us to come to her but through her to God,” a phrase which complements the motto of the Jesuits, per Mariam ad Jesum, “through Mary to Jesus.”
As Virgin and Mother Mary embodies the truth of our humanity theologically speaking. She is not simply a model for women but for all people, men and women alike, whether single or married. She is the symbol of faith and of our true humanity simply considered in itself. Why? Because she is Virgin and Mother, at once completely pure and fruitful in its radical spiritual sense, conceiving and bringing forth Jesus Christ. He is “that pure one [who opened] purely that pure womb which regenerates men unto God and which he himself made pure” (Irenaeus). In this she embodies the meaning of the Church in its truth in God as divinely established, quite apart from its failings, faults, and sins as a human institution. Yet, we, too, are to be about that kind of purity and fruitfulness that brings forth Christ in our lives.
Mary is both an essential part of the Church and the symbol of its true life in prayer and devotion. In this sense, the Church is Marian precisely in her fiat mihi. “Be it unto me according to thy word.” That is the Church’s prayer par excellence as fully articulated in the Lord’s Prayer. That prayer, as Augustine teaches in the Enchiridion, speaks to our hopes for things heavenly or spiritual and things earthly or of the body. “Th’ abridgement of Christ’s story”, as John Donne puts it, upon the coincidence of the Feast of the Annunciation and the Passion of Good Friday falling on one day in 1608, shows the intimate and inseparable union of Mary and Christ with respect to the unity of the divine and human in him, the latter through her, and for the life of the Church in the necessary connection between the Incarnation and the Passion of Christ.
Mary is “The Female Glory”, to use Anthony Stafford’s title of a remarkable work of 17th-century Anglican Marian Devotion. While this certainly highlights the dignity of women, a point upon which Augustine also insists, more importantly Mary is the example and emblem of the true relation of our humanity to God. It is captured most completely and most beautifully in her words here at the Annunciation and in her “keeping all the words of Christ and pondering them in her heart,” even the things of the Passion where her heart, too, will be pierced. Mary embodies the true and full openness of our humanity to God. This is the radical truth for which our humanity exists and to which it is called. Her virginity and motherhood do not negate our worldly experiences but highlight the primacy of things spiritual with respect to the true meaning of purity and fruitfulness in lives lived in service and sacrifice to God; in short, the things of the Passion of Christ made known to us through the humanity that he assumes from her.
Fr. David Curry
Eve of the Annunciation, 2026
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2026/03/24/sermon-for-the-eve-of-the-annunciation/
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